Report: Intuit Plans to Lay Off Around 3,000 Globally, Accounting for 17% of Total Workforce

According to an internal memo obtained by Reuters, the business software giant Intuit plans to lay off about 17% of its global workforce, involving approximately 3,000 employees, with the aim of streamlining the organizational structure and reducing complexity. The company's CEO, Sasan Goodarzi, in an email to all employees, stated that simplifying the structure will help the company deliver better products faster.

Intuit will release its third-quarter financial results on Wednesday evening, and the news of the layoffs was made public in advance, shifting market focus from "how many people will be laid off" to "why lay off at this time". The direction given by the management is to concentrate resources on a few key strategic directions, with AI being the most explicit main thread.

As stated in the memo, the layoffs are intended to help the company focus on key projects, including AI. Intuit has signed multi-year cooperation agreements with Anthropic and OpenAI, to deeply integrate advanced AI models into its own software and embed professional capabilities in areas such as tax, finance, accounting, and marketing into Claude and ChatGPT.

Reuters mentions that this year companies like Block, Amazon, Pinterest, and others have also announced layoffs, with some businesses citing AI-induced efficiency improvements as a significant reason. For software companies, layoffs generally can improve market expectations of cost performance, but if revenue growth slows down simultaneously, investors' pricing of "efficiency improvements" will be more cautious.